From a pure price perspective, they are making a huge profit on the Pro over the Plus. A 3TB drive does not cost $200 after you factor in the 1TB base. It is maybe $50 of retail cost (MAYBE) and they are charging $150 on top of it in pure profit.

In the end, it's a $100 difference between what you'd pay now versus what you might possibly be able to pay as a third-party drive replacement. Is your time opening up the unit, as well as dealing with another vendor, worth saving $100. What about when something needs servicing and you have to either put the original drive back in or take the replacement out to have it replaced separately from everything else? What if there is some issue down the road and you can't quite tell whose problem it is to know where to contact for repair? Too much hassle to save $100... especially when, simply from past experience we're talking about a cost I can easily amortize over at least 2 years, so we're now looking at justify trying to save $4/month, and frankly, that's just not worth the potential hassle, or even the delay in being able to get it.

Everyone will have their own threshold, of course. Just explaining why I'm not overly bothered by what appears to be a bigger than expected price disparity for what's likely the only difference in those models.

It seems to me it would make more sense to add another drive later if needed. $200 seems way too high

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The only external drive that's tivo-approved is an overpriced one. I assume that the software will reject any other kind of drive you care to attach. That's why external drives aren't such a hot deal. I hope that CableLabs is responsible for this bit of stupidity, because there's no purpose to the restriction otherwise.

In the end, it's a $100 difference between what you'd pay now versus what you might possibly be able to pay as a third-party drive replacement. Is your time opening up the unit, as well as dealing with another vendor, worth saving $100. What about when something needs servicing and you have to either put the original drive back in or take the replacement out to have it replaced separately from everything else? What if there is some issue down the road and you can't quite tell whose problem it is to know where to contact for repair? Too much hassle to save $100... especially when, simply from past experience we're talking about a cost I can easily amortize over at least 2 years, so we're now looking at justify trying to save $4/month, and frankly, that's just not worth the potential hassle, or even the delay in being able to get it.

Everyone will have their own threshold, of course. Just explaining why I'm not overly bothered by what appears to be a bigger than expected price disparity for what's likely the only difference in those models.

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I pretty much agree, and if I buy one I'll likely get the Pro. Now my debate is do I need one right now, or should I hold out and see if prices drop.

The only external drive that's tivo-approved is an overpriced one. I assume that the software will reject any other kind of drive you care to attach. That's why external drives aren't such a hot deal. I hope that CableLabs is responsible for this bit of stupidity, because there's no purpose to the restriction otherwise.

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With the S3 units they allowed any external drive. They restricted it with the Premiere units. I'd think if it was a CableLabs issue they would have restricted it on the S3 too. I think this was an attempt at quality control. They could qualify the drives and ensure they wold work properly without causing issues. However the partner they chose turned out to over priced and under sized. Hopefully they'll at least consider qualifying more drives by other manufacturers going forward.

I've always wondered myself if it wasnt some sort of deal that Tivo made with Western Digital. Supply them with drives at a good discount, and they would only allow their DVR expander to be used. I know at one point some people were getting 500GB Seagate drives in the Premiere 4's, but when I got one it had a Western Digital in it which I was happy about. The has to be some sort of connection to it all. I dont know much about the Tivo software though, so maybe it has something to do with that.

I bought a Plus because I usually keep my Elite at 40% capacity and really don't watch the same shows over and over (although my 2 year old daughter does and her disney movies take up half my used space). So, once I get my Roamio, I'll have 1TB on it and 1TB on my Elite and I believe you can stream between them if we want to watch a disney movie in the other room.

Here's another angle - having a 2TB drive in my premiere for over a year now, I can tell you that list can get mighty long. You can filter by name so you can always find stuff, but it can still get a bit messy. How will this look with 50% more shows, or even double if people figure out how to get a 4TB drive in there? Since I'm already using kmttg to offload stuff to my media server, I'm thinking I'll just go with the plus, save the $200 and I won't miss the space anyway.

What would be really nice, would be if they added an interface to organize shows into folders manually, or tag them so that they could be grouped more intelligently than just by date or by name. If they had that, then I would definitely be interested in getting an even larger drive in there. As it stands, not so sure. And even if they had this advanced grouping, then I would lean more toward putting a 4TB drive in myself, so the pro is still not that enticing.

One of the reviews mentioned something about a 3 column My Shows List with better sorting. Not exactly sure what they're talking about, but it sounds like there may be some improvements coming to My Shows to deal with longer lists.

The only external drive that's tivo-approved is an overpriced one. I assume that the software will reject any other kind of drive you care to attach. That's why external drives aren't such a hot deal. I hope that CableLabs is responsible for this bit of stupidity, because there's no purpose to the restriction otherwise.

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No. Cable Labs is not responsible as it is the content owners who put up all these restrictions. We are lucky they even allow us to record anything, even once.
You have to take this out on Disney Corp, Fox News Corp, Sony Corp, Time Warner, Comcast, and CBS Corp to name the big players.
Disney, Fox News, and Sony are the worst for restrictions on what the consumer can do with content. Especially Sony as they are one of the founding partners for HDMI. Also these corporations are the big reason your cable/sat bill is so high.

I bought a Plus because I usually keep my Elite at 40% capacity and really don't watch the same shows over and over (although my 2 year old daughter does and her disney movies take up half my used space). So, once I get my Roamio, I'll have 1TB on it and 1TB on my Elite and I believe you can stream between them if we want to watch a disney movie in the other room.

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Furthermore, if they actually have Netflix and Amazon apps working well, then it should be easy to find/play your movies from those instead of the hard drive (which often have commercials on them from the station I recorded them from).

I know I seem to always be harping on this as my keynote issue, but to have additional memory internally is 10X more valuable than having an external drive connected by eSata. Trust me, you don't want to rely on the external drive keeping up with the life cycle of the box. When the external drive fails you'll be sitting there empty-handed wondering where your money went.

A few months from now, if the Comer tool gets updated, maybe the Plus. But for now the convenience of the extra capacity is worth the difference. The Pro should be about $100 less, but think of it as the early adopter tax.